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Bhope Jo Tar is a small village in Vejhiar tehsil Mithi of District Tharparkar, there are near about 100 households settled. All the families belong to a minority community. The majority of villagers work as daily wage workers and mainly depend on livestock, rain to cultivate their agricultural land. Before the project intervention, there was the only one dug well that was used by the local villagers to fetch water. Normally, water collection is a heavy task in any drought-affected village of Tharparkar as it requires 4 to 5 people to collect water. As beside one person who collects water, the other 4 people stretch the rope until the water pot touches the water level to fetch water. Women and children are mainly responsible to fetch the water for the family. Each day water collection takes normally takes more than 2 hours of their time for each family.
PVDP selected this village keeping in view their vulnerabilities and challenges related to fetching water was the main concern due to which the family members had to sacrifice their daily wage while collecting the water for the family.
In response to COVID-19, PVDP has successfully implemented an integrated project on “Emergency Response through WASH, Livelihood & Food security interventions to COVID-19 and 20 drought-affected communities in District Tharparkar, Sindh-Pakistan. PVDP has installed 10 solar submersible water pumps, distributed 2500 food packages, 1000 vegetable seeds for kitchen gardening, and provided 800 latrines through the provision of latrine construction material and labor costs.
Through effective social mobilization and training, the village-based committee has established a mechanism to collect 150 Pak rupees (monthly) from each family to ensure operations and maintenance of the solar submersible water pump. The villagers have also ensured that each household avoids open defecation by using the latrine provided by the project.
During the implementation of project PVDP has provided the food package for one month to most deserving, COVID-19 and drought vulnerable families, there was the peak time of lockdown, and the people were not allowed to move for any purpose, by the provision of food assistance the vulnerable and deserving families were facilitated and the spent lockdown period with relaxation, during the provision of food assistance, COVID-19 sessions were conducted with the community at hamlet level and pamphlets about COVID-19 prevention measures were also distributed.
PVDP in this project have to pay 150 PKR per month for the operation and maintenance, before this activity a MOU was signed with villagers regarding the proper management and maintenance of the water facility, at the initial stage of the fund collection villagers has made functional one existing nonfunctional water facility, while one new water scheme have been provided to same village and now 3 major water facilities are in the village and water management committee is also play a strong role in collection of community contribution on monthly basis, run the water scheme and look after the overall things related to this, in addition PVDP has provided latrine material to 28 families and the labour cost of 1500 PKR also have been provided for construct the latrine in their house premises and stop the open defecation while rest of families has constructed latrine from their own resources, for improve the food security, PVDP has provided the seed to 38 women for installation of Kitchen Gardening and conducted the proper Kitchen Gardening management Session with these selected Kitchen Gardening beneficiaries. The several families has benefited from the household level Kitchen Gardening.
The Village committee members are playing their active role to look after the schemes have been provided by PVDP organization and they are also considered Water Management committee by the villagers, now days the Water Management Committee members named Shankar Lal, Lachaman Singh and other are directly responsible to ensure the collection the monthly contribution and its consumption.
Shankar shared that it was wonderful that the complaints response mechanism was exists during the project implementation period and we were helped by the communication through the CRM and several households got benefited through food packages and latrine material by the mechanism
Now days, the KGMC is functional and playing active role for sustainability of the project activities in village Bhope Jo Tar, currently there sanitation and water problems have been permanently resolved of whole village and they experienced in Kitchen Gardening. Mr. Lachman Singh, Shankar Lal and others are very satisfied with PVDP and they hope that PVDP will continue these types of assistances to the most vulnerable and deserving communities and grow more and more.
